Month: July 2016

Many times you’ll find that you need to put a document into an acceptable form to be accessible by others. one way of doing this is to convert it into an e-book using microsoft word, a programme used daily by most people. Word had enough features to make an e-book quite easily.

When writing an e-book, use a minimum of styles; and keep the texts clean and as simple as possible, with a simple layout.

The steps to creating an e-book using a word doc are:

Open word, click new page

If you want to see how your book will appear on several pages as you type, click view, two pages (optional)

It is usual to start with the following:

a title page which includes a sub title if applicable, and the author’s name e.g

a copyright page

acknowledgements and a prologue if you wish to include the latter.

After each of the above pages, click insert, pagebreak or ctrl +enter to insert the break and go to the next page

Copy a page or two, of a doc already on your pc into the other pages. It must have a main title or heading and subtitle.

On the home tab, look towards the right of the screen and click on change styles, style set. Hover your cursor over each style in turn and watch how the text you’ve pasted on the page changes with the selected style. Select one to apply to your text. Apply normal style to the body of your text; and also choose a style to apply to the heading.

You get the same results if you hover the cursor over the images namely ‘normal’, heading 1, heading 2 etc

Alternatively you can click on normal and right click modify to make changes to your text. The advantage with this one is that, you see the changes as they will actually look on screen in real time.

If your book is a novel with several parts, use

Header One for Parts, (if there are several parts of the book)

Header Two for Chapters, and

Header Three for sub headings

Click file, save as pdf or xps, create PDF/XPS button. Type a name for the e-book, and then select the desired optimizing option and click Publish

For table of contents click references and select one of the options provided or click ‘insert table of contents’, choose the first option and click ok. Click section break, break to go to the next page

If there are images in your book, position your cursor at the place where you’d want the picture to be. Click on insert, picture and select a picture from your pc. Right click on the picture and apply more formatting to it. If you so wish

Go to Insert and click header and also footer – for page numbers, to add both to the pages

8. Adding an E-book cover

Word has provided e-book covers one of which will be inserted instantly as soon as you click on it. This can be obtained from Insert, Cover Page, and customize it accordingly.

You can also use image creating sites gimp, photoshop etc. to design the e-book cover of your choice, save and upload unto the book from your pc.

Always test your e-book template with a few pages of the book before finalising it.